THE LONG AWAITED iPhone X is now available. Apple’s 10th-anniversary smartphone went on sale across the globe on 3 November, with thousands of customers queueing to get their hands on the £1,000 handset.

The iPhone X (pronounced iPhone 10) is the company’s first smartphone to feature a full-screen display, as it sets its sights on the likes of the Galaxy Note 8. There’s also an all-new ‘Super Retina’ resolution, a reinforced glass design and support for wireless charging, with the iPhone X arriving with support for the Qi charging standard.

The handset is also available to buy through Apple’s iPhone Upgrade Program, with monthly payments starting at £56.45.

Carphone Warehouse, naturally, offering the iPhone X and is flogging the phone on tariffs with EE, iD, O2 and Vodafone. Pricing starts at £56 per month with a £199 upfront cost, a Vodafone tariff that comes with 26GB monthly data.

O2 is selling the iPhone X, with delivery currently set at “up to three weeks.” Pricing for the Apple flagship starts at £58 per month with a £189.99 upfront cost, a tariff which comes with just 1GB monthly data

Sky Mobile is now taking iPhone orders. The network’s Swap 24 tariff, which lets customers upgrade every two years, start at £42 per month with no upfront cost, unlimited texts and calls (for Sky customers) and 500MB data, while its Swap12 plan starts at £54 per month with a £99 upfront cost.

Tesco Mobile hasn’t started taking orders but has said how much the iPhone X will cost. It’ll offer the 64GB handset on a 30 month £52.49 tariff, and the 128GB model on a £57.99 plan.

Three has opened up orders and is currently offering delivery on release day. Pricing starts at £61 per month with a £249 upfront cost, which gets you 12GB monthly data and unlimited calls and texts.

Vodafone’s pricing for the iPhone X starts at £62 per month with a £200 upfront cost, which gets you 4GB monthly data. The network is still promising, at the time of publication, that the handset will be delivered on 3 November.

Latest news3/11/17: The iPhone X today went on sale across the globe, as was met with large queues as ‘thousands’ lined-up to buy the £1,000 smartphone.In the US, some reportedly fought outside the San Francisco Apple Store to figure out who was first in line, while here in the UK, as the British do, hundreds patiently queued outside Apple’s flagship store on Regent Street, with one buyer having been waiting since Tuesday.

01/11/17: Best Buy has been forced to back down from selling the iPhone X with a $100 mark up over the Apple Store. Meanwhile, we’ve worked out that even going SIM-free the TCO of an iPhone X is over £98 a month over two years.

30/10/17: Some who managed to bag themselves an iPhone X pre-order before shipping times slipped have spotted an opportunity and taken to eBay to flog their Apple handset. Here in the UK, one buyer is attempting to sell his £999 £64GB iPhone X for, er, £15,000, with another looking for £10,000 for his iPhone X pre-order on Vodafone.

26/10/17: Apple has confirmed that iPhone X pre-orders will begin at 8.01am on Friday, and is advising buyers that the quickest way to order will be via it’s official Apple Store app.

25/10/17: Apple has reportedly told suppliers to reduce the accuracy of the phone’s flagship Face ID system in order to speed up production times. “People familiar with the situation” have said that although the downgrading of the feature is only slight, it won’t be as good as the original specs, despite supplier Foxconn being given a two year lead time. “It’s an aggressive design,” the source said, “and it’s a very aggressive schedule.”

20/10/17: Apple’s iPhone X production woes are coming to an end, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. In a note, seen by Apple Insider, Kuo claims that Apple’s assembly yield rate for iPhone X has stabilised, adding that he expects the company to stockpile between 2 to 3 million units in before the device ships on 3 November. Kuo believes that production will ramp up in November, with shipments to grow rapidly in the first quarter of 2018.

18/10/17: Apple has responded to a letter from Senator Al Franken, who raised concerns about the implications of Apple’s new Face ID feature, in particular, customer security, third-party access to data and whether the tech could recognise a diverse set of faces. In its response, Apple says that that the chance of a random person unlocking your phone is one in a million (in comparison to one in 500,000 for Touch ID), adding that after five unsuccessful scans, a passcode is required to access your iPhone.

17/10/17: According to reports, Apple’s manufacturer Foxconn recently began shipping the first round of iPhone Xs to various countries, but that first batch only includes 46,500 devices. This is likely due to issues holding up production of the TrueDepth camera, with some reports speculating that the biggest production challenges surround the dot projector, which projects more than 30,000 dots on the user’s face to create a depth map to enable FaceID, animoji, and other features.

16/10/17: Apple’s manufacturing partners Foxconn and TSMC are still struggling to produce enough TrueDepth camera sensors ahead of the iPhone X’s launch next month. So says reports out of Japan, which claim that the firms can’t get high enough yields of the 3D sensors required to make the TrueDepth camera work properly.

13/10/17: The iPhone X comes with a new feature that will ensure nobody snoops on your notifications. Phone Arena reports that the phone will only show lock screen notifications with content when it knows that you are the one looking at the phone. If it’s someone else, they will only see the notification source. This feature will also be coming to older devices, but given their lack of Face ID, users can choose for their iPhone to only show notifications with content once it has been unlocked.

12/10/17: The iPhone X isn’t out for another month yet, but scams are already targeting Facebook, Instagram and YouTube users with the promise of a free smartphone. Security firm ZeroFOX says it found more than 500 fake social accounts that are using techniques including pushing and fame-farming to amass follows to later sell onto hackers.

9/10/17: Ming-Chi Kuo has re-affirmed previous comments that Apple will be lacking iPhone X stock in 2017 and said in a note that the so-called ‘supercycle’ – which refers to a large number of existing iPhone users upgrading – won’t begin until next year.

5/10/17: iDrop News has looked into its crystal ball and imagined what the future of the iPhone X might hold. A plus-sized model is the answer, and the website has shown off what this might look like in renders (below). Er, unsurprisingly, it looks like the iPhone X but bigger, and houses the same irritating notch at the top of the display. According to rumours, Apple will launch at least two OLED iPhones next year, measuring in at 5.85in and 6.46in, respectively.

3/10/17: Ming-Chi Kuo can’t get enough of talking about the iPhone X, and has said in a new research note that the smartphone’s TrueDepth camera system is way ahead of the Android competition and likely will estimates that it will take rivals ‘1.5-2.5 years’ to catch up. However, production issues persist, and Kuo has lowered his estimates of iPhone X shipments in 2017 to 30-35 million units from a previous estimate of 40 million.

2/10/17: Apple ain’t the only winner if its flagship iPhone X sells well, as it turns out that Samsung will make $110 (around £82) per device sold. That’s according to Counterpoint Technology Market Research conducted for The Wall Street Journal, which says that as Samsung supplies OLED displays for the iPhone X – along with batteries and capacitors – the firm “is likely to earn about $4bn more in revenue making parts for the iPhone X than from the parts it makes for its own flagship Galaxy S8 handset.”

2/10/17: Apple hasreleasedan environmental report bigging up the green credentials of its iPhone X. For example, it boasts that the smartphone’s materials are free from the likes of arsenic, mercury and PVC, and notes that 100 per cent of packaging fibres “are sourced from responsibly managed forests, bamboo, waste sugarcane, or recycled paper.” The company calculates that the total estimated greenhouse gas emissions for the iPhone X over its entire lifecycle are 79kg CO2e, of which 80 per cent is during production, 17 per cent in use, 2 per cent transport and 1 per cent recycling.

29/9/17: Punters after an iPhone X might not be able to find stock until “January at the earliest”, according to analyst Gene Munster. This is due to production hold-ups, which earlier this week were blamed on Apple’s ‘complex’ camera system used for Face ID authentication. Jan Dawson, an analyst at Jackdaw Research, predicts that iPhone X stock won’t to be able to meet demand until “sometime in the first quarter”.

28/9/17: Apple has released more details about the iPhone X’s Face ID functionality in a bid to address some of the privacy concerns surrounding the face-scanning tech. For example, the firm points out that information collected by Face ID – including infrared images of your mug – won’t be stored on your device, and notes that images are also cropped to avoid grabbing background info. Apple also points out several instances when Face ID won’t work, including when your phone has just been switched on, where there have been five unsuccessful attempts to match a face or if you initiate the Emergency SOS feature.

27/9/17: Apple’s TrueDepth camera system, used for face recognition on the iPhone X, could be holding up production. So says respected analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who notes that the “complex” system is the reason Apple is struggling to achieve mass production, and likely the reason the device will be in short supply until next year.

Kuo said, via MacRumours: “TrueDepth camera may be main production bottleneck of iPhone X ramp. The 3D sensing (TrueDepth camera) on iPhone X is composed of a structured-light system, time-of-flight system and a front-facing camera, which represents a far more complex structure than those of rivals. It will, therefore, be harder to achieve mass production. While we project iPhone X will see output ramp up meaningfully in mid/ late October, tight supply may only start to ease in 1H18F due to strong demand.”

26/9/17: Apple’s Tim Horton, a member of the firm’s WebKit team, has urged web developers to embrace the iPhone X’s unusual ‘notch’ cutout. In a post on Friday, he insists that “content is automatically inset within the display’s safe area so it is not obscured by the rounded corners”, and has offered up tips on how to properly build websites for the iPhone X to ensure that content isn’t be obscured by the sensor housing, home indicator, or rounded corners.

25/9/17: Apple’s iPhone X might not be able to support Gigabit LTE, according to reports. While a teardown of the iPhone 8 revealed a Qualcomm X16 modem with Gigabit LTE support, Apple has also made some units with an Intel modem that isn’t equipped to support the super fast speeds.

21/9/17: The iPhone X could face further delays, according to Raymond James chip analyst Christopher Caso. He writes the production of the handset likely hasn’t yet begun, and notes that it could be hit by further production delays. Caso said: “While our checks are ongoing, initial feedback from our meetings suggests that final production of iPhone X has not yet begun, with production expected to commence in mid-October. That production start is about a month later when compared to expectations a month ago, and about two months later than expectations at the end of June.”

20/9/17: While many have bemoaned the iPhone X’s £999 price-tag, Apple CEO Tim Cook has said that it’s a “value price” based on the technology inside the phone. Speaking on Good Morning America this week, Cook said: “Most people are now paying for phones over long periods of time, and so very few people will pay the price tag of the phone initially. Also most people actually trade in their current phone, and so that reduces the price further, and some carriers even throw in subsidies and discounts.” Er.

19/9/17: KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has said that Apple likely won’t be able to meet demand for the iPhone X until next year, with supply set to be “limited” in 2017. In a note seen by MacRumours, Kuo said: “Due to supply constraints, we expect market demand won’t be fully met before 1H18. We revise down our forecast for 2017F iPhone X shipments from 45-50 million to around 40 million units, but we, therefore, revise up our 2018 iPhone X shipment estimate to 80-90 million units.”

18/9/17: Apple’s A11 Bionic chip has been put through its paces in GeekBench 4, and has crushed the likes of the Galaxy Note 8, Galaxy S8 and OnePlus 5. The iPhone X’s multi-core score came in at 10,069, trumping the Exynos 8995-powered Note 8 which scored 6,784. Antutu benchmarking scored have also leaked, and show the iPhone X with a combined score of 226,058 – more than 45,000 points ahead of the closest Android competitor.

15/9/17: Apple’s Face ID technology will support just one registered face per device, TechCrunch reports. This could be an issue for some that have the fingerprints of their partner, or kids, registered on their current iPhone, with devices currently supporting up to five fingerprints per device.

14/9/17: Apple has spoken out about the Face ID fail (below) it suffered on Tuesday and has blamed the glitch on a lockout mechanism which was triggered by clumsy staff handling the device. A company spokesperson told Yahoo: “People were handling the device for [the] stage demo ahead of time and didn’t realise Face ID was trying to authenticate their face.

“After failing a number of times, because they weren’t Craig [Federighi], the iPhone did what it was designed to do, which was to require his passcode.”

12/9/17: The iPhone X is official and is Apple’s first smartphone to pack an edge-to-edge screen, but unfortunately, rumours of the notch cut out at the top of the screen were also on the money.

The handset’s so-called ‘Super Retina’ OLED display measures in at 5.8 and features a 2436×1125 resolution, making it the highest resolution iPhone to date. It also features Apple’s True Tone display tech and, much like the new Apple TV, supports both HDR10 and Dolby Vision content.

This screen sits inside a new ‘all-glass’ chassis, similar to that seen on the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus. While you’ll probably have to put it in a case to prevent shattering, Apple claims this is the most durable glass to feature on a smartphone yet.

There’s also the same A11 Bionic processor under the hood. This six-core CPU is divided into two low-performance cores and four high-performance cores, with the regular cores being 25 per cent faster than the previous A10 chip, and the high-performance cores being up to 75 per cent faster than the A10 SoC. It also comes paired with Apple’s first homegrown GPU, which offers 30 per cent more performance than the A10.

Naturally, given the phone’s all-screen front, there’s no physical home button. This means that Apple, as expected, has dumped Touch ID functionality, replacing it with ‘Face ID’ face recognition technology.

This is enabled by a bunch of sensors on the front of the phone, including a 7MP ‘TrueDepth’ camera, and the A11 chip’s built-in neural engine, and Apple claims that it’ll work even in dark conditions and if you change your appearance. It’s pretty secure too, according to the firm, which claims that there’s a ‘one in a million’ chance of somebody, er, spoofing your face.

Apple has also introduced a new swiping up gesture to go ‘home’ on the iPhone, which is also used for multitasking on the iPhone X. The lock button on the side of the handset can now be used to fire up Siri.

As expected, on the rear of the iPhone sits a vertically-aligned 12MP dual camera, comprising of dual telephoto and wide-angle lenses. There’s also a new Portrait Lighting mode for taking selfies, and optical image stablisation built-in.

Wireless charging is included, with the iPhone X supporting the same Qi wireless charging standard as the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, which means customers will be able to use third-party charging accessories. Apple gave a sneak peak at, naturally, its own AirPower wireless charging mat which will be coming next year.

There’s also been a boost to battery life, with Apple claiming two hours more battery life than the iPhone 7 before it.

Oh, yeah, and there’s Animoji. What a time to be alive.

The iPhone X, or 10, whatever, will be available in Space Grey and Silver.

Older news and rumours12/8/17: KGI’s Ming-Chi Kuo has ‘confirmed’, via 9to5Mac, that the so-called iPhone X, along with the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, will support wireless inductive charging standards, which means that customers will be able to use third-party charges to take advantage of the feature. She also notes that Apple’s own wireless charging accessory won’t be ready at launch.

EE has added weight to this rumour, having today launched a new wireless charging bundle that allows customers to add a Qi charger to their plan.

12/8/17: Apple has added a new mail-in option to its iPhone Upgrade Program for US punters. Spotted by MacRumours, the new option will enable those upgrading to an iPhone 8 to mail their old smartphone to Apple using the firm’s Trade-in Kit, negating the need to visit a physical Apple Store.

11/9/17: In what some are calling one of the “biggest leaks of all time, Apple has leaked the Golden Master (GM) version of iOS 11. The information was made available by an Apple employee, according to blogger John Gruber.

The leak, according to 9to5Mac, reveals that the firm’s new flagship smartphone will arrive as the ‘iPhone X’ and will launch alongside the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus.

Besides the name of Apple’s 10th anniversary iPhone, the iOS 11 leak also confirms that facial recognition, dubbed ‘Face ID’, support is coming (below), which is expected to replace the Touch ID on the so-called iPhone X.

Other new features outed in the leak include, er, animated emoji (or ‘Animoji’) support, a Portrait Lighting mode for taking better selfies, True Tone Display and a rejigged lock button that will allow users to interact with Apple Pay and Siri in the absence of a physical home button. References to new Apple AirPods and a LTE-equipped Apple Watch have also cropped up in this mammoth leak.

8/9/17: The Wall Street Journal (paywalled) reports that “glitches” in the manufacturing of the iPhone 8 could lead to supply shortages and delays in shipping following the smartphone’s unveiling next week. The production glitches reportedly delayed the manufacturing process by about a month, sources ‘familiar with the matter’ told the newspaper.

7/9/17: German website Macerkopf claims that pre-orders iPhone 8 pre-orders will kick off on 15 September, adding weight to a previous leak courtesy of Evleaks. According to earlier rumours, the handset will arrive on shelves a week later on 22 September.

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